Sean D. Francis

Why Aren’t You Listening to Podcasts?

Posted on 04 August 2010

Right now there are hours of information being uploaded to the internet in the form of podcasts. There are books being read, interviews being done, ranting and raving, music, mirth, and mayhem all for free, all for you. There is a podcast on pretty much any subject you want to know more about. There are podcasts on car repair, on yoga, on specific television shows, and entire podcasts about nothing.

As I talk to my friends who aren’t in the tech world and bring up this podcast or that podcast they get this far away look in their eyes as if I was the first guy on the block to own a TV trying to describe the things I have seen to people who have only kind-of-sort-of heard about TV. Finally a few of my friends stopped me and wanted me to explain how to listen to podcasts. I realized as I attempted to explain the process, it wasn’t straightforward. The reason it isn’t straightforward because there isn’t a single way to do it.

While the actual number varies depending on source, it is generally accepted that iTunes has a huge number of users. That means if you have iTunes installed you have immediate access to all sorts of podcasts that are listed in the iTunes store. Simply subscribe to the the podcasts you want and it will be ready for you to listen to on your iPod type device.

Okay, yes, that is simple enough. I’ll stop being glib. Here are the actual steps you need to take to subscribe to a podcast through the iTunes store. In iTunes go to Store>Search. In the Power Search selection change the dropdown to Podcasts. Now in the description field enter a topic you are interested in. For example, enter Chess. Some of the podcasts that come up include Chess is Cool by Chess Grandmaster Alexandra Kosteniuk and PE Chess Cast. If you are interested in algae, there is the Scientific American Podcast
. Once you’ve located a podcast you want to subscribe to, click the subscribe button and now that podcast will be available to listen to on your iPod device.

Wait… not every podcast is listed on iTunes, though. Now how do you subscribe to a podcast when it isn’t listed in the iTunes store? First you need to locate the podcast. Consider these locations: Podcast Alley, Podcast.com, Podomatic, or Podcast Pickle. Once you’ve located the podcast you want to listen to, click the subscribe button associated with it (maybe it is an RSS Feed button) and copy the subscription link. Go back to iTunes, select Advanced, then click on Subscribe to Podcast then paste in the link you copied. Congratulations, you’ve successfully subscribed to a podcast.

What if you don’t have iTunes? You can utilize doubleTwist, a free media synchronization tool (don’t let that scare you, it really is just a program that organizes your media and lets you synchronize your media with your MP3 device).

doubleTwist has podcast searching but you can also get the podcast feed address like I described for iTunes and in doubleTwist go to File and select Subscribe to Podcast.

What if you don’t have an mp3 player, a smartphone, or iPod device? You can still subscribe to podcasts using an RSS reader. I know RSS feeds seem really scary to some people but honestly they are the best possible way to get the information you want from the internet. Instead of visiting dozens of websites a day you can use your RSS reader to catch up on all the updates of your RSS enabled websites. A podcast feed is just an RSS feed so you can use something like Google Reader to subscribe to your podcasts. As a sidenote, if you have an Android phone, you can download the Google Listen app which then synchronizes the podcasts you have subscribed to in Reader to your phone without having to connect your phone to your computer. It is amazing and something I’ll cover in a different post.

I said at the start that the process of listening to podcasts is not straightforward. The actual content is flexible and very open which means there are countless ways in which it is accessed and utilized. I highly encourage everyone to at least make the effort once or twice to seek out a podcast on a topic they enjoy. Don’t be discouraged by aged or dead podcasts. I know I am responsible for more than a few dead podcasts in the iTunes library. Podcasts end, get abandoned, move… but unlike radio shows or television programs, so long as the files are still hosted somewhere you can enjoy the podcast.

If you have never listened or watched a podcast before I would really like to hear from you on this topic. Why aren’t you enjoying this new medium? If you do try to listen to a podcast, I’d really love to hear about your experience.